Write off
We have a good English phrasal verb for you today, which is “to write off.” When you write something off, it means that you dismiss it. You decide that it’s not important, or not relevant, or has no place in the future. You decide that you’re just going to ignore it or forget about it.
Many people had written Joe Biden off after he placed fourth and fifth in the two earliest primary states. They wrote him off because they didn’t think he could recover from such embarrassing losses. They thought that the eventual nominee would be Bernie, or maybe Mayor Pete Buttigieg, or maybe Elizabeth Warren—who knows. But they wrote Biden off. They dismissed him. They determined he wasn’t going to matter in the future, so they wrote him off.
Obviously not everyone wrote off the former vice president—the voters in South Carolina had their say, and then Biden staged his Super Tuesday comeback. Maybe that shows you shouldn’t be so quick to write someone off in politics, right? When Donald Trump announced his campaign with a bizarre speech in Trump Tower, many people wrote him off. There’s no way a character like that could win with such an unconventional approach. They wrote him off right away—but they then regretted not taking him seriously.
That’s often how we use “write off,” almost as a warning not to dismiss something or someone so quickly. A lot of people wrote off the panic over the coronavirus as just an irrational fear. But I think they were too quick to write that off. Exports from China are way down, the tourism industry is getting hit hard, as we talked about in Lesson 238 . Now, economic growth may slow or turn negative later this year as the world deals with the effects on the slowdown in trade. A lot of people wrote this off as something that will quickly pass; they thought it wasn’t important; they dismissed it. But now they might regret writing off this crisis too soon.
There are two other ways of using “write off” as well, both in a business or financial sense. There are two ways of using it in business. First, if someone owes you or your business money, but you don’t think you’ll be able to collect that money, you can write it off. That means, in your financial statements, you accept it as a loss. So for example, if I promise to pay JR’s company $100, his financial statements will say that he’ll get $100 soon. But if he decides that I’m just never going to pay it, he’ll write the $100 off, and in his financial statements, he won’t show that he’ll get $100 from me. He’s writing it off because he thinks I won’t pay. Obviously that would never happen! That’s just an example.
The final way of using “write off” is to classify something as an expense that you don’t have to pay taxes on. I won’t confuse you too much with that, but do keep that in mind.
Usually, though, “write off” has to do with dismissing something, whether that’s something financial like a debt or non-financial like a presidential candidate.
Quote of the week
The candidates for the American presidency are 78, 77, and 73 years old—Trump is the youngest. The youngest person in contention is 73! So I thought I would look for a quote about aging or being in your 70s. I found a funny one, but it’s a variation on a much more common saying. That would be, “there is no cure for the common cold.” It’s often presented as an irony, that modern medicine can accomplish so much, but the one smaller annoying disease we all seem to get—the common cold—is still without a cure. So there’s no cure for the common cold, but here is what the astronaut John Glenn has to say: “For all the advances in medicine, there is still no cure for the common birthday.”
That’s all for today’s Plain English lesson. Thanks for joining us, as always. Coming up tomorrow: a hippopotamus is a large animal the lives in the rivers of sub-Saharan Africa. But it also lives in the rivers of one other country far, far away—and the residents of that country are not happy about it. On Thursday’s lesson, we’ll tell you which country that is, and why hippos live there.
If you’ve enjoyed today’s lesson, then I think you’ll love Plain English Plus+ , our membership just for listeners who want to take that next step from intermediate to advanced. I told you I was working on a redesign of the web site and I noticed we have over 60 video lessons so far, all of them about how to express complex ideas in English. When I say, go from intermediate to advanced, these video lessons are what I mean, and they are consistently ranked among the most popular features of Plain English Plus+. You can see a sample video lesson to get an idea of what I mean by going to PlainEnglish.com/sample, where you can watch an example video lesson. So check that out at PlainEnglish.com/sample .
Learn more expressions like this
